Pokin’ the Pumpkin
Abduction attempt foiled by flimsy tines
Written October 2021
My friend Scott, vacuum repairman, is the solicitous guardian of a shrinking garden. His promising tomato crop has been promised to another, or so the wannabe-promisee, Sarah-the-Stalker, has decreed.
The woman is blight personified; Sarah, a sporadic customer who stops in to purchase bags for her Dirt Devil, hails from Scott knows not where.
She has haunted his property for months, brazenly entering the yard at her whim, regardless of whether he’s present. One of Scott’s neighbors, noting frequent nighttime visits by a strange woman, clad in Sarah’s trademark fuchsia shorts and six-inch silver platform sandals, inquired snidely as to Scott’s shady side business.
A few months ago, Sarah appropriated one of Scott’s tomato plants staked in the side yard. Disappointed by the paltry yield from the moribund plant, which she acknowledges waterlogging, Sarah turned her attention to Scott’s back garden.
Once, in my presence, Sarah had the hubris to request that Scott remove the fence and overhead netting, under the guise of concern for the health of the hemmed in plants. I wryly remarked that Scott has lost far more plants to thievery than to containment.
